The Ecumenical Christian Church U.K.

Although we know more about Paul than any other disciple or apostle (and we don’t know much as I wrote before) this is mainly because when the writings of The New Testament were finally decided and Paul’s enormous input of almost half was accepted it was mainly accepted by the circum-Mediterranean bishops. We forget that the other apostles were also evangelizing, Mark, for instance in North Africa, and Thomas in India.

For all that these church founders may, to an extent, be legendary boosters to the prestige of ‘their’ Churches the fact remains that Christian churches were springing up all over the East, even as far as China and Tibet, and their total number of adherents probably exceeded that of the Church that we tend to think of as ‘the Christian Church’.

Gospel of Matthew c250 AD

The members of these churches were often categorized by ‘Rome’ as heretics, but they thought of themselves as Christians, and sometimes even reciprocated by considering Rome (or the Great Church as it called itself since it included what later became the Catholic and the Orthodox factions, which remained more or less united until the eleventh century) as heretical itself.

There were many interpretations of the teaching of Jesus, and each interpretation was considered correct by the Christians who followed it. These ideas came from various writings almost all of which were categorized by the Great Church as untrue once the canon of was finally agreed in the fourth century CE (i.e. nearly four hundred years after Jesus was actually teaching).

We know there were at least fifty, possibly more, of these writings. In the past couple of centuries many of them have been recovered, often from the sands of Egypt, sometimes intact, sometimes in tatters and some we only know from polemical comments by their opponents. Many of these writings are similar in teaching, and most purport to have an apostle as their author even though they can be shown to be of much later date, usually 2^nd or 3^rd century in origin.

Recently we have come to call most of them ‘Gnostic’ but this is a modern early 20^th century catchall. They referred to themselves as ‘Christians.’

 

Constantine, as our hero became known, grew up to be a great and competent warrior, and on the death of his father who had been ruler of the western half of the Roman empire, claimed to be emperor, and made good his claim by defeating the emperor Maxentius at a great battle at Milvian Bridge near Rome in 312CE. He had been inspired to this victory by a vision of a blazing cross with the inscription ‘In this sign conquer’ (in Latin of course).

Constantine had hoped that he would find it uniting to have Christianity as the State religion, but he had not reckoned with the disagreements between the various factional Churches which often claimed jurisdiction over the same areas, and threw the accusation of heresy at their fellow Christians, often leading to vicious street fighting between adherents of the various factions. Of course there had always been disagreements between Christians. St Paul makes that clear in his letters, but the Christians had never before had the power of the state behind them, and from which they expected support.

Constantine was displeased, and the displeasure of a despotic emperor is to be avoided. So he called a meeting of the leaders of the Church(es) at Nicea in 325CE and by his personal attendance ensured peace, harmony, and acceptance of his wishes and decisions about what Christianity should teach even though he knew no theology at all!

However anyone who disagreed with him was pronounced anathema or heretical and banished. This situation rapidly brought unanimity among the Christians in the Roman Empire, although the defeated and banished Christians went on, in the main eastwards, to establish a great and thriving Church which held their own beliefs.

Because of the power and centralization of the Roman empire we in the west have only fairly recently come to realize that there were, and are, Christians other than those of which we have been generally aware, although via trade links they have occasionally popped into our histories, like the priestly envoy from China’s emperor Hulagu to the Vatican, who came to England and from whom King Edward 1 received Communion, and a Nestorian bishop ordained in 1889 a Russian who eventually became an Orthodox Bishop.

For the rest of his life Constantine led and guided the Church in the West so that when he died it was a fixed state body, which had pretty well a uniformity of belief and authority, and although there was to be much debate yet on what was true Christian belief, the bones were established. They were fleshed out by the great Ecumenical Councils, which finally determined what had to be believed for a person to be saved.